At the door Don entered a security code into a keypad and submitted to a retinal exam. Heavy locks opened with a clatter, and the door swung back. Mel glimpsed a corridor within, softly lit. Music played, a wash of some gentle, almost melody-free ambient sound. Over that there was a distant murmur of voices-soft, as if sleepy. He was expecting some staff member to come forward, a nurse in a crisp white uniform, but nobody came.
Don, apologetically, ordered Mel to search the couple before they went any further. He found no weapons, not so much as a kitchen knife.
“Mr. and Mrs. Couperstein, you can just go ahead,” Don said. “You’ll find a bathroom, a coffee machine, a reading room with books.. Others are waiting there. Somebody will be with you shortly.”
Mr. Couperstein hesitated for one second, a complex expression crossing his dirty, gnarled face, and he shook the dust from his roughly cut gray hair. But Mrs. Couperstein sighed. This would be fine. This was just like a hotel, like the one they stayed in once at Aspen where they had gone skiing, and now you’d scarcely believe they had ever been young enough to do that. She kicked off her battered shoes and stepped through the door. Her feet left blood on the floor. The door slid softly shut behind them.
Don stepped back, and checked his watch. “It’s only half an hour to the next cleanup. We’ll stick around here. Come on.” He led the way back to the processing barrier.
In the next thirty minutes two more offers were made of a stay in the Respite Center. One was to a man who pushed an elderly lady in an impossibly battered wheelchair; he must have been fifty, she eighty, and suffering from dementia. A foul stink of ordure came from beneath her dirty blanket. The other went to a young father with a child aged about three, a collection of skin and bones with a head that lolled, too heavy for her body. The mother had run away that morning, taking their packs and the last of their food with her. Yes, the man longed for a break. Mel and Don escorted the son with his mother, the young father and his daughter, to the Respite Center, which they entered with as much relief as the Coupersteins had shown.
Don checked his watch again. “One p.m. Almost time.”
There was a whistle from a Homeland officer. Soldiers and cops came trotting up, and Don led Mel to join a rough perimeter around the center. An engineer approached, and showed his credentials to the senior officer. He checked the door to the center was sealed, and worked a handheld.
“Have your weapon ready,” Don murmured to Mel, hefting his own AK-47.
The engineer pressed one last key on his handheld, and stood back. Mel heard a whir of pumps, a hiss of some gas. And he smelled a strange, elusive smell, something like almonds.
The sun was breaking through the cloud. None of this seemed real. Mel said, “I guess the gas pipelines run underground.”
“Be a bit obvious if they didn’t.”
“Why the perimeter?”
“Sometimes the respite patients change their minds at the last minute. Try to break out.”
“And we shoot them.”
“If we don’t contain them we get a hell of a security mess, and a health hazard.” Don glanced at Mel. “I know what you’re thinking. They taught us about the Nazis in the Academy, didn’t they? We aren’t Nazis, Mel. Hang on to that. This is an American government doing all it can for its people. We’ve got nothing else left to offer them.”
“They think they’re going in there for a break. Not to die-”
“No. They know, on some level, even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves. It’s OK. I know how this feels. It’s only a few more minutes.”
Mel saw it all now. This was the very essence of the engine that had protected him, and the Ark, for years, an engine that ran on flesh and blood and false hope.
It seemed a long time before the hiss of gas stopped. A man in a pale blue NBC suit approached now, and a trooper came along the line of the soldiers, handing out more suits.
Mel took his numbly. “What now?” he asked Don.
“Cleanup,” Don said. He put his weapon on the ground and began pushing his legs into the suit trousers. “Just a precaution. The gas has been pumped away.”
“I can’t.”
“You must. It’s your duty. One job we can’t delegate to the eye-dees. Come on, man, help me zip up this damn thing.”
That was how it went for the rest of the day for Mel, until his watch ended at around eight p.m.
Don walked him back to the tent city, and helped him find his bunk, his stuff. Mel’s mind seemed to have shut down. The other bunks around his were full of sleeping troopers, men and women, most still clothed, their boots on the ground under their bunks. Officers moved silently between the rows, offering quiet words when a soldier stirred.
Mel drank some water, but found he didn’t want to eat.
“That’s fine,” Don said. “Just sleep. That’s what you need above all. Sleep.” He had a flask, a plastic cup. He poured a golden fluid out of the flask. “Drink this.”
Mel took a sip. It was strong, flavorful, and as he swallowed a mouthful he felt a kick at the back of his head. “Wow.”
“Alma’s finest.” Don grinned. “And there’s something in it, a powder from the medics. It will help you sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep. It’s too early. Eight o’clock-”
“It’s an order,” Don said gently. “Go ahead, finish this, lie down. Go right to sleep now and the memories won’t get a chance to form, and it won’t feel so bad in the morning. You know, the guilt.”
Mel hesitated. But he was too exhausted to argue. He sat on his bunk and pulled off his heavy boots. His feet stank, after sweating all day inside the layers of socks. He rolled onto his bunk and pulled his blanket over him. “Where did we learn these procedures? Maybe this is how the Nazis enabled their death squads to function.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Don said grimly. “If not, I guess we had to figure it out for ourselves.”
“Holle-the Ark. I don’t want to miss seeing that.”
“I’ll wake you.” Don glanced at the roof of the tent. “Holle and Kelly will never know how lucky they are, to have ascended from all this.”
“Don’t forget to wake me,” Mel whispered.
“I promise. Sleep now.”
When Don did wake Mel, in the small hours, it was to the sounds of shouting, and a stink of burning.
55
Even inside the Buckskin Street compound there was chaos, with troops and civilians running everywhere.
Patrick Groundwater checked his watch as he ran, his coat flapping around him. He’d meant to be at Mission Control by now. The warp bubble fire up was only minutes away-or rather, off in the orbit of far Jupiter, it had or had not already happened, his only daughter was on her way to the stars, or not. And the news of that terrific event was limping its way at mere light speed across the solar system, with no regard for the anxious beating of a human heart. He looked up, but the sky was full of broken cloud, and pillars of smoke rose up to obscure it even more. If the eclipsed moon was risen, he couldn’t see it.
He was fifty-nine years old. He couldn’t run any faster. Damn, damn.
By the time he reached Mission Control the smell of burning was looming close, the crackle of gunfire closing in. He found troops ringing the building. Even in the urgency of the moment he had to show an ID and submit his retina to a laser-flash test. As he fumbled for his papers a great beating, as of huge wings, descended on him from above. He ducked, and some of the soldiers around him flinched and raised their weapons. It was a Chinook, maybe the last one flying anywhere in the world, its dual rotors roaring over the battered township, and playing its lights down in dusty beams to assist the ground operations.